Paul Draper, the CEO and chief winemaker at Ridge Vineyards in California, is trying to pressure other high-end winemakers into placing full ingredients lists on the labels of their bottles.Photo by Ridge Winery

One Man’s Quest to Reveal What’s Actually in Your Favorite Wines

Paul Draper, the CEO and chief winemaker at Ridge Vineyards in California, is trying to pressure other high-end winemakers into placing full ingredients lists on the labels of their bottles. Ridge Winery

Wine may be a $320 billion industry worldwide, but it’s not being driven by sales of $1,500 Screaming Eagle. The average price of a bottle of wine sold in 2012 was barely six bucks.

Wine is increasingly an industrial product, cooked up millions of gallons at a time in behemoth factories in Australia or central California. The grapes going into it can come from just about anywhere. But making cheap wine isn’t easy. If something goes wrong in your massive, 350,000-gallon tank, you’ve got a big problem. Dumping the batch isn’t an option—cheap wine doesn’t stay cheap if you pour out the swill. The good news is if the wine doesn’t come out right, well, a quick fix can be applied. A litany of high tech machines and chemical additives—called adjuncts—can be (legally) used to correct mistakes, hide inconsistencies, improve the taste or color of wine.

These additives and processes aren’t something you’re likely to hear about when you’re touring Highway 29 in Napa, and the industry isn’t anxious to start with disclosures, for fear the romance of the wine business would be irrevocably spoiled. Unlike most food and drink, wine and other alcoholic beverages are governed not by the Food and Drug Administration (part of Health and Human Services) but by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (part of the U.S. Treasury). As the name suggests, the TTB’s primary goal is to collect taxes on booze and cigarettes, a longstanding vestige of Prohibition. Consumers have largely been left in the dark about what’s really inside the bottle.

JUICED: HOW TO MAKE CHEAP WINE TASTE GOODWhat’s Velcorin? What are powdered tannins? And what is this stuff called Mega Purple? Learn about the secret ingredients winemakers are using to boost the color and flavor of that $10 cabernet. Read “Juiced,” Christopher Null’s feature on the use of additives in the wine industry which appeared in the May 2014 issue of WIRED.

Not everyone is thrilled about this, and as with many secrecy-laden industries, transparency is a buzzword that has a few wine industry leaders twittering. Their savior is Paul Draper, who has been lambasting adjuncts for years and who eschews their use at Ridge, where he’s been the chief winemaker since 1969. A legend in the business, his Cabernet placed fifth in the famous Judgment of Paris in 1976. His newest, somewhat Quixotic quest: to introduce full and truthful labeling to wine bottles. Ridge has published real ingredients labels on its bottles since 2012.

While Draper dislikes adjuncts, the enemy, he says, isn’t just cheap wine: It’s also winemakers’ increasing thirst for wines that are ready to drink without significant aging. This not only drives consumer sales, it also helps to drive higher scores from wine critics, as even professionals can struggle to rate a wine based on its future potential.

That in turn has led to a more nefarious way in which adjuncts are being deployed. While they are often used as an easy way to make cheap wine more palatable, adjuncts are increasingly being applied to high-end wines to eke another couple of points out of the critics. “You have that machine. It costs a half a million or a million dollars and it’s sitting in your winery,” Draper says. “The temptation to use it in years when you don’t need to use it is immense.” But ultimately, he complains, “If you use these techniques, you aren’t making fine wine.”

You’d think the various adjuncts wouldn’t make it past the sommeliers, high-end buyers, and big-name critics of the wine world, that such chemical or mechanical shortcuts would be picked up by their well-trained palates. But the truth is that these things can’t be sniffed, tasted, or spotted unless they are overused.

“Usually you need lab equipment to detect additives,” Draper says. “The Europeans had a very sophisticated machine that could analyze a sample for non-approved varieties like the Rubired in Mega Purple [a popular grape concentrate used to deepen the color of red wine], which was used to reject non-vinifera wines being imported from the States. They also had another machine that could detect whether non-grape sugar was added to a wine, and could even tell where the beets used for the sugar came from.”

Draper’s solution is not banning adjuncts, but asking winemakers to disclose them on a voluntary basis.

“What we’re doing is probably not popular, especially with the large producers,” he says. “I realize how hard it would be for almost everybody. To make full ingredient labeling a requirement would not only take up the whole back label, it would almost be a disservice to the consumer in terms of complexity.”

‘What we’re doing is probably not popular’ — Paul Draper

The TTB says it formally considered ingredient labeling most recently in 2005, following a petition in which it was claimed that, when surveyed, 91 percent of consumers said they supported ingredient labeling on alcoholic beverages. However the TTB still declined to recommend labeling, citing negative response from the industry, namely small brewers and wineries which complained about the costs that ingredient labeling would involve. Since then, a “Serving Facts” label has been approved by the bureau, but it is not compulsory and few wineries have adopted its use.

Rather than fight the TTB, Draper is focusing on the high-end winemakers who are using these techniques, citing one (nameless) producer which produces a $750 wine stuffed with additives. “We’re trying to set an example. I’m trying to shame them into using better winemaking techniques,” he says bluntly.

Do consumers read labels? Do we really want to know? You might not recall the massive 1985 scandal in which a number of Austrian winemakers got caught spiking their wine with diethylene glycol (a major component of antifreeze) as a way to sweeten and boost the body. No one was injured, but the scandal decimated Austrian exports for more than a decade. Labeling requirements were never seriously discussed.

“For thousands of years, wine has made itself with guidance by man, rather than being made by man,” says Draper. The greatness of a wine should be driven by the grapes and the earth they come from, not what a tinkerer can do with them in the lab.

History has his back. In Bordeaux, vigneron is the term for a grape cultivator, the man who works the fields and tends the vines. But, notes Draper, “In French, there is no word for winemaker.”